3D depth composition in 'Hugo'

1. Hugo
2. Drive
3. The Artist
4. Melancholia
5. The Tree of Life

In looking back at the movies of the year 2011, especially take note of the leading ladies of 2011, who form an exceptionally strong slate. I’d even say, and this is rare, the Best Actress line-up this year is stronger than Best Actor. Part of this has to do with the relative dip in the latter category, which usually is one of the strongest ones. Despite the ridiculously all-star list the Golden Globes have produced in Clooney, DiCaprio, Fassbender, Gosling and Pitt, there were no real transformative male leading performances. There was no Colin Firth in The King’s Speech, no Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, no Sean Penn in Milk, and definitely no Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. DiCaprio’s portrayal of Hoover is just not up to par. The Best Actress field however, is more interesting.

Male self-destructive tendencies in 'Moneyball'

We’d have the established names in Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn), Viola Davis (The Help), Charlize Theron (Young Adult) and, dare I say, Saoirse Ronan (Hanna). The field is livened up with fresh faces in their breakthrough year such as Felicity Jones (Like Crazy), Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene). They’ll have a tough time getting an Oscar nomination for their breakthrough performance, trying to follow in the footsteps of Jennifer Lawrence last year and Carey Mulligan the year before.  Some actresses even had to reinvent themselves, including Keira Knightley (A Dangerous Method) and Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia). Unfortunately, Dunst will probably be ignored come Oscar time due to the Von Trier Cannes debacle, despite her Best Actress win at the festival. Sometimes there really is such a thing as bad publicity.

Paranoia in 'Martha Marcy May Marlene'

Like the list above, the following picks are personal favorites, NOT awards predictions, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they somewhat overlap. As I haven’t had the opportunity to see everything, they’re only based on what I’ve seen.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Best Original Screenplay: Midnight in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay: Moneyball

Best Editing: Hugo

Best Cinematography: The Tree of Life / Hugo (can’t choose)

Best Actor: George Clooney, The Descendants

Best Actress: Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia

Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, Drive

Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain, The Help

Best Art Direction: Hugo

Best Sound Mixing: War Horse

Best Visual Effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Best Animated Feature: Rango

Breakthrough of the year: Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life, The Help, Take Shelter, The Debt, Coriolanus

Below you’ll find some archived picks.

Best Films of 2010

1. The Social Network
2. Inception
3. Black Swan
4. True Grit
5. Toy Story 3

Best Films of 2009

1. Avatar
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. A Serious Man
4. Up in the Air
5. The Hurt Locker

Best Films of 2008

1. WALL-E
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. Frost/Nixon
4. Låt den rätte komma in
5. Gomorra

Best Films of 2007

1. No Country for Old Men
2. There Will Be Blood
3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
4. Into The Wild
5. The Bourne Ultimatum

Jesse Eisenberg

A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A Best Picture Oscar.

Oscar season. The whole year the studios flood the market with rubbish, keeping anything with potential carefully locked up. The only blips on the radar appear when the blockbuster summer delivers a movie that just accidentally happens to be good. Only at foreign festivals they carefully test what they’ve got in stock. Then, when the Toronto festival arrives in september, sounding the unofficial start of the race, the gates open. The studio flagships make their grand entrance premieres and are unleashed to chase the most precious metal in the industry: Oscar gold. This year, one of them has an unlikely subject: the creation of Facebook.

xkcd comic illustrating the distribution of internet activity. Click for a high resolution version

Much has already been said about how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed, the movie is often compared to There Will Be Blood. Indeed, the movie’s version of Zuckerberg is probably the greatest anti-hero since Daniel Plainview. Both have uncompromising ambition and after turning away from everyone around them, eventually succeed.

Daniel-Day Lewis’s character, however, isn’t where the most parallels lie in respect to Eisenberg’s character. There is yet another one. Most movies are most often compared to others playing in theatres at that time for box office competitive reasons. If a movie has potential, it will be compared to all other that year, to keep track on the Oscar race. The Social Network is however already being compared to a great movie from years back. Not just a great movie, a classic. Not just a classic, the ultimate classic.

Citizen Kane

Almost seventy years after its release, Citizen Kane is still widely regarded as the greatest film of all time. Professional film critics who evoke its name in any other review knowingly put their entire credibility on the line. So their mere mentioning of the movie attests to how highly The Social Network is regarded. Of course, I’m not a film critic. Most people go to the movies with a popcorn and a soda. Critics go to the movies with a pen and a note block. I let my friends finish my popcorn. True story.

The similarities between the two movies however, are more thematically and perhaps structurally, rather than stylistically. ‘Kane’ was simply revolutionary, for stylistic innovations like its low angles, deep focus, layered staging and even things very apparent in ‘Network’, like overlapping dialogue and ‘lightning-mix’ to tie together different timelines. ‘Network’ has hardly any innovative tendencies, so it will never even come close to the classic’s legendary status.

Structurally, both films heavily rely on flashbacks to tell their stories. They consist of different characters recounting their experiences, the Rashomon effect writer Aaron Sorkin says he was aiming for. But the most striking similarity of the two films is that they both end with their ‘Rosebud’, which is established somewhere in the beginning. This leads us to the thematic and social likenesses.

The protagonists in both movies are young (Welles was 25 at the time) media prodigies turning media tycoons, but most importantly, they’re both based on real men still alive and influential at the time of release, putting their real life counterparts in a not-so-positive light. What is interesting is their reaction on the production and release of the film. Hearst went to all-out war with the Welles masterpiece. He threw everything up to the kitchen sink in his efforts to keep the film from opening. As his political and financial influence was considerable, large parts of the film industry and press actually folded. Theaters and newspapers boycotted the movie, there was an offer that wasn’t meant to be refused of almost a million dollars (this was 1941) to destroy every single reel of the film. At the Academy Awards, Hollywood’s lair, where it was nominated for nine Oscars, every mention of the movie was received with a booing audience. In the end, it didn’t matter, the creative power of the movie far outranked any social reference and after Hearst’s death, the movie took a status of mythic proportions.

Mark Zuckerberg donating 100 million dollars to the Newark public school system on Oprah:

As Zuckerberg almost never puts himself out the public, especially with his personal life, he knows that what most people will think of him will be defined be the movie’s portrayal. He is kind of forced to do this, he’s called out to at least raise doubts about the movie’s characterization of him. I don’t think he cares about his own public image too much, and he’s known for even caring less about money. But any public image damage could directly hurt Facebook as a company and as a project since, more than any other company, and this is often emphasized in the movie, popularity is Facebook’s core business. This is why they’re also very concerned about all the rumors about their privacy policy. Quoting out of Sorkin’s script:

Even a few people leaving will reverberate to the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online and if one domino goes, the other dominoes go.

It’s hard to predict how much doubts the movie will raise, I think the people at Facebook are still waiting it out. Zuckerberg takes a careful position in most of his responses on the movie, he doesn’t shoot it out, but he clearly distances himself and his company from it. I doubt Zuckerberg has much to worry about. But hell, projects like Firefox and OpenOffice thrive on Microsoft hate and social networks are a fleeting business, hence the large graveyard of other social networking sites.

But of course, he can’t play innocent trying to out-charm the movie. What he did to the Winklevosses was a fine piece of backstabbing prowess, even made more clear by his famous leaked text messages.

FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?
ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them
ZUCK: probably in the year
ZUCK: *ear

He has stated though, that he regrets all those things. And like the film crew has admitted: Noone wants a movie to be made about the things they did when they were nineteen years old.

The person primarily responsible for the characterizations of everyone involved is of course writer Aaron Sorkin, who has taken up the unofficial role of spokesperson when concerning the non-fiction aspect of the movie.

While he may have meant to write an unbiased screenplay, he has very strong opinions about Mark, Facebook and the internet, that have seeped through.

It was a device that was meant to connect us, to bring us closer together. I think, and I know that I’m in the minority, that it’s pushing us further apart. Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.

About the statistic that one in four Americans still believes Obama wasn’t born in the US:

There’s just too much bad information getting out there, and I have to believe that’s mostly the fault of the Internet, which isn’t held to any standards of accuracy.

About regulating the internet:

People say, well, there’s so much Internet content, how could you possibly do that? And the answer is, there would be a lot less Internet content! Thinning out the herd is a good thing. There would be a Darwinian falloff of people who think they can go out and just state anything they want as fact. [...] While everyone deserves a voice, not everyone deserves a microphone.

Make no mistake, the movie is neither nobody’s nor everybody’s version of the people portrayed, it is Sorkin’s version. He executed the Rashomon effect brilliantly, but only when concerning the events relevant to the lawsuits. The aspects he did make his own form the heart of the whole picture, since the movie isn’t really about Facebook or the lawsuits. What he saw in the movie, even before beginning his research, was the Greek tragedy. Note that Saverin consulted on Ben Mezrich’s book. Sorkin would’ve gotten his tragedy, even if the actual story didn’t turn out to be that way, which it didn’t. He made it into a story about a guy who ends up with both everything and nothing. But he forces this morality lesson by changing reality.

The real morality would be a completely different story. While Zuckerberg might be awkward, ruthless and a computer nerd, it’s got him to where he is now: rich, young, famous, without even caring for any of those things, living together with his long-term girlfriend and far from isolated. It would be a Randian fairytale.

Sorkin’s most striking use of creative licence is the elimination of Zuckerberg’s girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a Harvard med student he met before his Facebook success and helped him on the project of his life, which means she would’ve played a significant role in almost every event in the entire movie. It’s almost unthinkable to make a character study about a person without even mentioning their life partner. And he makes an uncalled-for jab at her, when, while addressing misogyny in the movie, writes:

More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80′s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

But of course, she doesn’t fit into his dated view of the isolated, frustrated geek and especially his tragic anti-hero. She has to make way for the character Erica, who, together with the protagonist’s also fictional desire to enter the final clubs, is the reason for the main character’s extreme drive.

I think Sorkin is healthily counterbalanced by his other collaborators. Fincher, like most top-directors, does embrace technology. For directors, technology delivers the tools to realize their imagination. The most powerful and influential directors all have a very tight connection to technology and drive technology instead of being driven by it: James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson… All a writer needs is a typewriter. Everyone of the young cast has pronounced their admiration of Facebook and both the real and fictional Mark Zuckerberg, with Eisenberg calling his character “entirely sympathetic”.

The fact that I’m now talking about the movie’s factual inaccuracies and about how it’s not Citizen Kane, all external issues that don’t directly have to do with the film as a separate entity, and I’m not alone in this, is of course because the movie in itself has no real flaws to write about. Sorkin justifies himself:

I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.

Of course, although with this way of thinking he does sound like his own main character, putting his project and passion above anything else, he’s absolutely right. The only thing that matters in a screenplay, is the screenplay. And it’s absolutely terrific. It has everything. In what was supposed to be a dull, geeky teenage courtroom drama, Sorkin creates a thrilling experience, by launching three timelines, that are finely woven together. He arranges one of those timelines to consist of conflicting versions of his characters’ testimonies. It all flows by lightning fast without ever being confusing.

Sorkin’s specialization is dialogue, the flow of dialogue, the sound of dialogue, and lots of it. An example is the scene in Charlie Wilson’s War where the characters of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks first meet. Apart from being really funny, what’s interesting is that both characters ask each other several important questions and PSH begins to tell a parable, but the conversation deviates naturally and in the end they both go their separate ways without any question having been answered nor the parable finished. Sorkin understands very well that real conversations don’t have a logical flow and he’s mastered how to bring thought processes to the screen. And in Mark Zuckerberg, a teenage genius, he’s found his ultimate puppet. From the very beginning he establishes this style of dialogue. Zuckerberg’s thoughts and words are all over the place, leaving his then-girlfriend trying to pick onto something, while the guy on the other side of the table is already babbling about something completely different.

Not only the flow of the dialogue is well thought out, the dialogue itself is also consistently extremely witty and often very funny without losing its weightiness, full of analogies and symbolic references. This, together with the mere amount of dialogue (the script is more than 160 pages), however, makes it a real challenge for the actors to speak the lines very quickly and make the wittiness seem natural. Luckily, Fincher’s methodology is tailored for this problem. Fincher’s very known for demanding tens of takes for each scene. The first scene was shot a whopping 99 times. This way the actors are able to make mistakes and little original peculiarities might make it into the movie. He also means to tire the actors, he sometimes only considers withholding takes after hours of shooting the same scene, after midnight. This way he prevents them from ‘acting’ and makes sure their entire surroundings seems comfortable to them when it’s supposed to be in the movie. It lends itself to Sorkin’s demanding script, and is very different from, for example, Eastwood’s one-take method, which only works with the best of actors, but is unforgiving to unexperienced ones (hence the obnoxious performances in Gran Torino).

David Fincher

Fincher’s also responsible for adding visual flair, what other talkies, say, In The Loop, are often lacking, while keeping it dark enough from becoming a Jason Reitman dramedy. As is obvious from his repertoire, with movies like Fight Club, The Game (I am so sorry), Panic Room and Se7en, he knows how to make a movie look slick. From the Facemash explosion over the ‘fuck truck’ arrival to the dinner montage, he makes the whole movie an extremely exciting watch. One could say however, that he almost overdoes it in staging the regatta race. While the heavily stylized scene surely grabs the viewer’s attention, the slow-mo race stands so much in stark contrast with every other hyper fast scene that it may take the viewer out of the movie, especially with the immediately recognizable track playing over it.

Why Fincher’s also a very good fit for this supposedly unbiased depiction of true events, is that he always stays clear of sentimentality, as one would expect from a director with an affinity for the psychopathic. He doesn’t like to sweeten the package for the audience, as one can witness in the beyond ice cold Lake Berryessa killing scene in Zodiac. His previous movie is also a good example of this. While he started out with a script from the writer of Forrest Gump with an extreme amount of similarities to that movie, that is often accused of cheesiness, Fincher’s cold treatment of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button resulted in it often being accused of being boring without an emotional core. I do have confidence in him readapting the Millenium films though.

His previous experience with attaching CGI heads to bodies in ‘Button’ certainly came in handy for ‘Network’, when he had to put Armie Hammer’s face on Josh Pence’s body for every scene. Poor Armie had to double the considerable amount of takes Fincher enforced, since he had to do every scene twice to establish the Winklevoss twins. Hammer’s very good, especially in the very funny scene with the Larry Summers character (who is now Obama’s chief economic advisor). I can’t describe his characters better than he does himself,

which is demonstrated here:

Taking these securities fraud allegations are true,  although this behaviour is obviously not to be commended, dramatically, it’s absolutely beautiful. Even when settling Zuckerberg cheats the same people in the same way: by promising something he knows he’s not going to deliver. It’s a pity Sorkin didn’t put this into his screenplay. Although, he’d have ended up with a victorious Zuckerberg with a smug smile on his face, which would be entirely besides the point he was making.

The characters that tie the movie together are two women, much more respectable than all the others in the movie. It’s Sorkin speaking to the public through his classiest characters. The accusations of misogyny in the movie are ridiculous facepalm material, he even displays a certain reverence towards the female gender in writing these characters. Erica, acted by the new incarnation of Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara, plays the important albeit small part of key motivator to the main character and his deepest psychological complex. She is Rosebud. The heart-breaker. You definitely feel uncomfortable in Mark’s place.

You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that’s what the angry do nowadays.

This is definitely a frustrated and bitter Sorkin speaking, in what New York Magazine calls “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media”.

Rashida Jones plays Merylin Delpy, the law firm associate. Unfortunately, a lot of her lines come over forced, making it all too obvious why Sorkin has written her. She’s the Ellen Page in Inception, the exposition character, the newcomer whose experiences the public is supposed to share, the voice the public is supposed to agree with. She gets the final say about the main character. In the beginning, Erica throws a statement: “… you’re an asshole”. In the end, Merylin responds and concludes with her final line.

A highly publicized performance was of course that of Justin Timberlake, in his ironic role of Napster founder Sean Parker (“Who knew the music industry doesn’t have a sense of humor?”). He does a good job, but he can’t hold a candle to the two actors who surround him. The part had more potential than what he made of it. I also can’t describe his character better than how the real one demonstrates in this video:

Another ironic part is Disney’s Brenda Song’s feisty and sexy role as Christy, Saverin’s girlfriend. She plays vixen well, but it’s primarily the boyfriend’s reaction that adds to her role. Our brand new Spiderman (to the soon to be Golden Globe nominated Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy) Andrew Garfield is about to start his celebrity life with an Oscar nomination. He’s a large contributor to the ambiguous nature of the portrayal of the events. Garfield’s Saverin may be a likable, good-hearted friend, supportive of Mark and full of good intentions, he is also completely incompetent, petty, naive and nobody to give responsibility to in a business venture. And, when reaching for the sky, why would anyone ever judge someone based on his personality? He had to be cut off… right?

Adventureland and Zombieland star Jesse Eisenberg turns to the dark side from his usual reluctant, dead-pan line delivering, unlikely hero. He is absolutely magnificent. Sorkin’s lines seem to come natural to him. Even more, he seems to be thinking a billion other thoughts while saying them. He also understands that extreme arrogance can be tremendously entertaining. It’s hard to completely blame his character for everything he does to the people around him. He’s just a tunnel visioned, obsessed prophet with his eyes on the prize. No hard feelings. He’s also responsible for the massively powerful final ‘Rosebud’ scene and especially the final frames, giving a heart-wrenching meaning to the phrase “Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world”. I can imagine Sorkin must have leapt from his seat yelling “That is EXACTLY what I wanted!” when watching these few frames.

And that’s perhaps the most dangerous aspect for the real Zuckerberg. It doesn’t matter that there was a movie being made about him. Not even that it’s a big-budget Hollywood movie (40 million is a decent sum of money for a non-period piece, non-visual effects driven film without 20 million dollar stars. Even District 9, a Best Visual Effects Oscar nominee, did so with 30 million.). But that it turned to be a great movie, a movie that can and will go on to lead a life on its own, that’s something to be aware of. Its reputation might still stand strong long after Facebook is forgotten. A potential Best Picture Oscar might drastically grow the movie’s long legs and turn it into one for the ages, making it nigh impossible for Zuckerberg to clean up his public image.

But we’re far from there yet. It’s still about four months until the Academy Awards, in a race where momentum can change day by day and it already faces heavy competition. You can’t get to more than 5 Oscar nominations without making a few enemies. Its main competitors include The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, Toy Story 3 and to a lesser extent Black Swan and Cannes darlings Another Year and Blue Valentine. There are even hopefuls that nobody has seen yet. Whereas I don’t have too much confidence in The Fighter, the Coens are capable of anything, including spoiling the fun for Fincher with True Grit. With the aggressive strategic positioning of the movie for a Christmas release, within a week of the Oscar eligibility deadline, Paramount displays heavy confidence in forgoing the possible festival build-up and hoping to take everyone by storm. There may also arise competitors out of nowhere, someone might even take, what is unaffectionately called, a The Blind Side spot, a movie that’s not supposed to go anywhere near the category, but that, due to other factors such as raw box office numbers or raw star power, gets in anyway. To predict this, you don’t want to look at a movie’s quality, but at certain sensibilities of the 6000-headed voting body. After all, the Academy Awards are still in essence, like any other awards show, an industry reaching for the spotlight outside its borders for a self-congratulatory pat on the back. Those they want to promote, they will promote.

Left: Rooney Mara, The Social Network; Right: sister Kate Mara, 127 Hours

Best Picture and Best Director aside, where The Social Network has nominations locked and we’ll have to wait until the SAG and DGA awards to make a final prediction, the film also has serious potential in the other categories. A Best Actor nod for Jesse Eisenberg is guaranteed, but for a win he’ll need to beat James Franco and especially Colin Firth. He’d be the youngest ever to win the award (Adrien Brody was 28 when he won for The Pianist). In the Best Supporting Actor category, the film will do well, with a shoo-in nomination for Andrew Garfield and with terrible luck, even one for Justin Timberlake, which I would disagree with. For a win here, it’ll yet again have The King’s Speech as main contender, where Geoffrey Rush is the one to beat. Rooney Mara would’ve surely been in for the Best Supporting Actress prize if her part was any larger, but now, she’s a long shot, though her impressive performance and the importance of her scenes, basically providing the protagonist’s drive throughout the whole movie on her own in just a few minutes, make her scenes linger and may yet yield her an Oscar nomination. In Adapted Screenplay, I don’t see how Sorkin could lose. With such a challenging setup for a film, he did a brilliant job. It is said that for a movie to work, you have to limit dialogue to an absolute minimum, unless you’re extremely good at it. The last part applies to Sorkin.

A Best Editing nod is highly likely, in part for its ability to continually switch between several time frames and still deliver a fast paced and naturally seeming flow, and mandatory for a Best Picture win. As a movie that’s situated most of the time in deposition rooms, dorm rooms, offices, etc., it isn’t a traditional contender for the Best Cinematography prize and has no chance against the likes of Roger Deakins (True Grit), Anthony Dod Mantle (127 Hours) and Wally Pfister (Inception), all DPs on projects with the director(s) they most often collaborate with. Moving on to Best Original Score, Nine Inch Nails’s creator Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross delivered a score that is very dominant in a lot of scenes and thus very likely to get in. As Pixar never fails to get a slot here and Hans Zimmer did terrific work on Inception, it’ll be a tough nut to crack. Finally, the film has a small chance to get slots in the sound categories, but I always find those hard to get right anyway, except for the obvious nominations for Toy Story 3 and Inception.

Oscar buzz or not, The Social Network has been called a generation-defining film. Apart from the obvious presence of phenomenons like Facebook, Napster and the like, what’s more interesting to me is the people portrayed. Although the movie still depicts more geek than geekster as in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, it’s a rare movie about the Generation Y university graduates. It’s a generation their Generation X and babyboom bosses have a hard time dealing with. It’s a new wave of potential employees or entrepreneurs that aren’t motivated by money or a long-term career plan, but want to engage themselves project by project, company by company. They don’t attach too much significance to formal hierarchy, but expect a team-oriented work environment. As they don’t want their private life put into a corner and have problems with strict working hours, they may come over as undisciplined. But they’re also more likely to blur private and working life, and when passionate about a project, fully commit and deliver a tremendous contribution. It’s the first generation that is more technology-savvy than their bosses and are networking experts. Rather then being company-loyal, Generation Y has a more self-promoting attitude. They don’t fit well into the traditional company context, or the other way around. But companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google embrace this new mentality. Facebook used to have a policy that all software developers must be in college or just out. Zuckerberg justified it by saying

The job lends itself to people with raw intelligence rather than industry experience

Industries become more and more innovation-driven rather than experience-driven, although some of it is industry-dependent. There’s arguably nothing in the world that can’t be done better than it is being done right now. And experience often narrows the mind. The movie captures this modern dynamic spirit well.

About sixty years after Hearst’s death, Citizen Kane is far more famous than Hearst has ever been and has proved to be far more influential. Hearst’s legacy, with his achievements as a businessman, as a media powerhouse and in politics, has completely been rewritten by Welles and Mankiewicz. It’s a war Hearst has lost. Let’s see how Zuckerberg fares.

Johan Honggokoesoemo

Brilliant Inception shot

In what was to be an astoundingly dull year, there wasn’t much to look forward to from Hollywood. Fortunately, the summer was saved by the hands of the ridiculously reliable Pixar and well… Christopher Nolan. Since his movie Inception was released, it garnered a steady, albeit not spectacular, two-time American weekend top box office spot. It received very good critic reviews, calling it an ambitious, daring and highly original visual extravaganza. However, I’m not going to talk about that. If you’ve seen the movie or have been in a conscious state during the summer of 2010, you know it’s pretty damn impressive. Nearly all of the more notable critics however, issued several caveats.

Nick Pinkerton of the alternative arts newspaper Village Voice writes:

It’s obvious that Nolan either can’t articulate or doesn’t believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams—and his barren Inception doesn’t capture much of either.

David Denby of The New Yorker compares previous cinematic interpretations of dreams, favoring the famous Spanish Buñuel:

Buñuel was a surrealist— Nolan is a literal-minded man. Cobb’s intercranial adventures aren’t like dreams at all—they’re like different kinds of action movies jammed together.

A.O. Scott of The New York Times:

But though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires.

It’s true, for the infinite possibilities a dreamworld offers, Inception‘s dreams are fairly unimaginative. They don’t feature an overwhelming high-fantasy world like in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. There’s no dark, menacing atmosphere like the one Burton’s Sweeney Todd offers. In fact, the dreams Nolan present don’t exhibit any charm or personality at all. There’s nothing mysterious or unexplainable about his dreams. It all makes sense. He even explains why there’s nothing unexplainable: “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” Nolan trying to justify his own stylistic choice doesn’t hide the notion that he is in fact a literal-minded man. An imaginative, immersive experience he cannot deliver. Everything that makes a Miyazaki movie so fantastic are things Nolan cannot do.

The incredible imagination of Miyazaki's Spirited Away

Although he continually challenges himself to work these really interesting and ambiguous concepts into his movies like amnesia, each time he takes the same approach. Like a true problem-solver he analyses the concept and only keeps a handful of key properties he thinks the concept represents. He actually reduces a complicated idea to a set of laws, throwing away everything else in the process.

This is how Rex Reed of The New York Observer harshly phrases it:

Writer-director Nolan is an elegant Hollywood hack from London whose movies are a colossal waste of time, money and I.Q. points. “Elegant” because his work always has a crisp use of color, shading and shadows, and “hack” because he always takes an expensive germ of an idea, reduces it to a series of cheap gimmicks and shreds it through a Cuisinart until it looks and sounds like every other incoherent empty B-movie made by people who haven’t got a clue about plot, character development or narrative trajectory.

In Memento, he reduces the condition of short-term memory loss to an almost predictable plot device bound by rules. Apart from the ability to tell his story backwards, the properties he keeps in his model of the affliction are vulnerability to manipulation, paranoia and a few others. The rest, more significantly the emotional baggage, of the real-life counterpart he discards, he deems irrelevant. What results is a puzzling thriller, magnificently put together, but without any real feel for the affliction portrayed, nothing to take away from it.

In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight he strips the concept of superhero of nearly all features normally associated with comic books. He keeps the hero and villain aspects, but discards the over the top and sometimes deliciously in bad taste extremeties that made comic book superheroes such a major cultural phenomenon.

In Inception he intelligently retains some ideas around the link between dreams and real life like the Edith Piaf music and the concept of “the kick”. But any logic-defying aspect of dreams, he evades. He wouldn’t know what to do with anything that doesn’t rely on a certain known logic, that doesn’t follow a certain set of rules or certainly thinks the audience wouldn’t.

While Nolan attempts to demystify these concepts, by throwing away anything he can’t comprehend he ends up blatantly changing reality. What he doesn’t understand, doesn’t exist. He basically sucks out every form of personality and charm, and replaces it, not with his own imaginative interpretation, but with reality. This analytical modeling is just the beginning of his almost flow-chart-like process towards a movie. Inception in many ways is Nolan talking about his view of storytelling, of constructing a story and delivering it, incepting it if you will, to an audience in a methodical, almost scientific way. He knows very well what he’s doing, he even tells you: “The deeper the issues, the stronger the catharsis.” Also, he lets Eames explain that actions are driven by emotional, more basic underlying ideas, in this case the relationship with the father. All principles for a course of Storytelling 101.

Richard Corliss of TIME:

Inception may or may not be a hit, but it is certainly caviar for film lovers. Even more than Nine, this is truly a movie about moviemaking. Its conversations are like story conferences (the production designer, Ariadne, consulting with the director, Cobb); it’s full of what might be considered alternate scenes and outtakes and is peopled with characters who could improv and abduct the plot. Finally, its noble intent is to implant one man’s vision in the mind of a vast audience.

The most impressive thing anyone retains from watching Memento is how it all works out. And with ‘works out’, I mean story-wise. The pure effort of writing such a challenging screenplay must have been tremendous. The logistics of feeding information in the movie feels almost like micro-management. However, as previously mentioned, there are no lessons learned about amnesia, nor is there much of an empathic reaction in the viewer. Cinematically, the movie doesn’t offer anything special, although the dark, moody paranoia in the movie is more than what the relatively barren Inception offers. Inception also stands as a giant feat, or, as Lisa Kennedy of Denver Post writes, “a boldly constructed wonder”. David Denby writes:

Inception, is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.

It is indeed, on Nolan’s part, more a result of hard work than of cinematic genius. More of engineering than of artistry. Don’t misunderstand me, I fully recognize the creativity put into the process. It really is engineering at its best. As an engineer myself, I definitely see the beauty of it. Or to quote a recently adapted TV series: I love it when a plan comes together. And it is this kind of satisfaction that Nolan strives for and achieves in the heist thriller. Nolan’s also one of the only big name directors without a disdain for directing story. Most other top directors focus directing in terms of scenes and dialogue (Tarantino, Coens) or moods and psyches (Scorsese).

Todd McCarthy of indieWIRE sums it up quite nicely:

The film does not deal in subconscious or mind-altered visions such as those served up in Salvador Dali paintings or abstract experimental films but, rather, in concrete and essentially realistic images. But these all come quickly and purport to serve specific purposes, so they contain, unlike the plot, meager mystery, little that is inchoate or haunting and nothing that reflects the doubts and fears of a moralist or the soul of an artist. Impeccably made as it is and, like “Vertigo,” blessed with an indispensable score, unquestionably the best thing Hans Zimmer has ever done, “Inception” plays like the film of a brilliant mathematician, scientist or engineer rather than a work by someone who, in another era, would have been a novelist, poet or philosopher. Nolan is a thinker, all right, a very busy explorer of mind functions, but capable merely of diagrams when it comes to the heart and soul.

I actually did experience the drama Nolan inserted into Inception as reasonably effective, though I attribute most of this to the exceptional cast, as with his previous movies. I’d even say his dramatic arc entirely relies on DiCaprio and Cotillard. It’s a bit unfortunate that Paramount moving Shutter Island out of Oscar season resulted in DiCaprio being in theaters with two very similar roles just a few months apart. I also think Nolan overestimates the effect of the tormented brooding protagonist by itself. In The Dark Knight, you at least had the juxtaposition of the self-doubting, troubled, frustrated, hopeless and desperate Wayne and the ever-confident, absolute Joker. Everything in human perception relies on contrast. In Memento, The Prestige and Inception, there’s barely any source of light to the protagonist’s dark center. A few shots of Mal and Cobb in love are not enough to intensify and place into context the guilt Cobb suffers from. Though you could say Nolan feared the film was already packed so tight, adding additional content could make it convoluted. But you don’t need a lot of screentime to make a powerful statement that lingers for the entire movie. A recent very effective example is Up‘s marriage montage justifying and creating sympathy for the old man and his initial unfriendly temper and grumpiness. In just three minutes Docter sketches an entire lifetime with ups and downs, with their joyful jobs working in the zoo and building their dream house, with the joyful, feisty Ellie being supportive to the worrisome Carl, illustrated by putting on ties, with a traumatic and personal issue creating miscarriage, with their shared dream and regret of going to Paradise Falls and with ultimately, his wife’s death.

Ellie and Carl in the Up marriage montage

Todd McCarthy:

One could ask for no woman more entrancing than Cotillard to embody a romantic ideal or a woman you’d want back, but unfortunately this whole aspect of the film seems like an intellectual conceit rather than a deeply felt impulse; [...] Here, the emotional component feels like just one part of a vast puzzle or game, albeit perhaps the most important piece.

Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum:

The reality that jostles the reverie is that, as brainiacally engaging as the movie is, Inception‘s emotions beat with a much fainter pulse. Nolan outfits Dom with an old-fashioned love of wife and children, and waking-life emotions of grief and guilt. But between DiCaprio’s characteristic (and, don’t get me wrong, often interesting) affect of broody complication, and the generic nature of Dom’s longings, the heart is far less engaged than the head for most of the show.

While you may indeed make the case that Nolan wasted some opportunities with both the dramatic arc and tackling the concept of dreams, most of it doesn’t bother you as most of what he does offer you, is so good. His engineered screenplay is overwhelmingly impressive, like a giant statue overarching the audience. There’s so much going on, and it indeed all comes together. What did bother me though, perhaps somewhat less than with The Dark Knight, is that Nolan has difficulty directing action. Giant setpieces do not cover up the fact that the actions scenes are a bit of a mess. Especially during the uninspired snow mountain action scenes, which he has called a homage to the Bond movies, people are hitting, chasing and shooting at eachother, while you wait it out for the story to continue. However, although you can’t watch the gravity defying hallway scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt without thinking of The Matrix, the scene is interesting by itself. Not so much due to what actually is displayed on the screen, but more due to what Nolan intended to be displayed on the screen. I mean: it’s a no-gravity hallway fight! Yet again, Nolan proves to be a great thinker, but perhaps less of an executor. But in movies, bluffing and suggestion can get you far. Mind though, director of photography Wally Pfister is still excellent, although the enormous similarities in angles and lighting to The Dark Knight, most noticeable in the city scenes, suggest routine.

Inception shot, reduce brightness to get a The Dark Knight shot

Like I said, his previous movie suffered even worse from the same problem. There he continually fails to deliver a coherent sense of time and space. And this isn’t because quickly moving actors, rapid cutting and jerky camera movements automatically lead to a confusing scene, those methods are used to provide a sense of urgency. If you look at The Bourne Ultimatum, which displays one of the most heavy camera motion and cutting intensive action scenes ever filmed, it does allow the viewer to know at any time what’s happening, where and how. This achievement cannot be overestimated, unfortunately action scenes are often taken for granted.

Impeccable editing in The Bourne Ultimatum

You also don’t need a high budget or impressive sets and props to deliver quality action scenes. Some of the best action scenes in recent memory, from an unlikely and unexpected source, are the flashback scenes in Slumdog Millionaire. Here directing, editing, cinematography, sound effects and music beautifully work together to add an enormous energetic drive to the scenes. Make no mistake: cinematically, this is some of the best the medium has to offer. With its simplistic storyline and borderline juvenile romance it shows that it’s not the message that matters, but the messenger.

The opening scene in Slumdog Millionaire

The riot scene in Slumdog Millionaire

The chase scene in Slumdog Millionaire

If we go back to the high budget blockbusters, there’s a movie with a similar philosophy: James Cameron’s Avatar. In contrast to Nolan’s Inception, Avatar is all about charm and personality. Hell, the movie basically consists of Cameron making a move on the audience for three hours straight. With an extreme eye for detail he lures the viewer into the world of Pandora. A mystical world, an utopian world. Movies often claim to transport the audience to a new world, but Avatar delivers. With the experience of alien worlds and the inspiration of the deepest underwater abysses, he invents an entire biological system. His 3D epic reminds us of the movies of long ago, movies based on the sensation of wonder and amazement. He carefully takes the time to draw in his audience and patiently paces his seduction scheme.

Your average Avatar shot

He also has no problem staging both one on one chases and the most massive epic battlefields. However, the movie is also intellectually bland. You don’t even need to see the theatric trailer to know how it’s all going to play out. In the land of high-profile blockbusters, Avatar is the antithesis of Inception. Both ambitious ten-or-so-year-projects, you have a modest, introverted Brit in the form of Christopher Nolan in one corner, and the extraverted, charismatic, perhaps a bit eccentric, Canadian James Cameron in the other. Their own personalities are clearly reflected in their movies.

The epic battle in Avatar

Unfortunately for Cameron, intellectual blandness is far easier to recognize than a narrow imagination. More importantly, it’s far easier to mock. But should it be? Doesn’t the audiovisual medium, doesn’t film as an art value expression of imagination and emotional involvement higher than intellectual challenge? Isn’t art more poem than puzzle? This issue encompasses the vast majority of the criticism towards both movies.

Ending on-topic, here’s a trailer mash-up:

Johan Honggokoesoemo

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

The new millennium started immediately with a remarkable trilogy of classics. As is common with classics of the epic genre, these films will not only be remembered by film scholars, but by families throughout the world. This is also Peter Jackson’s greatest achievement: the target audience was far from being limited to those who had read the books or to fantasy fanatics. In Dutch, the books are named In de Ban van de Ring, which loosely translates to Under the Spell of the Ring, which quite accurately describes the state of the film world at that time. Hollywood, and especially the Academy, really was singing Jackson’s tune.

Though very important to the fans, and also one of the reasons why this work enjoys so much respect, is that Jackson didn’t sell out, as in that he stayed very close to the source, being of course J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. One could stare himself blind on the amount of detail already present therein, though Jackson wasn’t too intimidated to introduce heaps of detail himself. For one thing I’m referring to the exquisite production values, which is now obvious due the third film being awarded a record eleven Oscars in the greatest clean sweep the Academy had, and still has ever seen.

One thing I have to mention is the cast, which is one of the few areas that didn’t get an Oscar. It can hardly be underestimated what challenge it was to bring a world where humans, elves and dwarves live together to the screen without it coming off as pure camp. Though the costume and prop design certainly helped in that respect, most of the credit should go to the actors. Although only McKellan as Gandalf went on to receive an Oscar nomination, the whole cast brought a level of intimacy amidst the epic battles, which is also why I’ve put the first film on this list. To me, it was the most intimate of the three. Whereas the other two films are greatly dominated by the legendary siege setpieces, it’s the first movie that has the most charm.

As it’s the audience’s maiden trip to Middle Earth, Jackson does his uttermost best to lure the viewers in the world and get them attached to the characters, namely the adorable Frodo. ‘Fellowship’ is also much more of an adventure movie than the others. We get to see the homes of every single major race and with it get a feeling of their identity. Clearly this was a ‘setup’ movie, though we still get a lot of the action and drama and feel of what has yet to come. The books were thought of as unfilmable, but Jackson is a clear example to the expression ‘the right man for the job’.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Since there’re more than enough romantic movies out there targeted solely towards women/girls and thus centered around a female protagonist, and the closest to a romantic movie centered around a male we usually get is either a teen sex comedy or a Judd Apatow movie, a thoughtful romance story that in detail describes a male’s experience is certainly refreshing, especially when realized so well.

What first may seem a gimmick, the memory erasing, is handled so well by the writers that it easily gets the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. The story isn’t really about the erasing, it’s about the consequences of romantic engagements, especially the more negative ones and how people have a very difficult time overcoming them to the point of not only wishing everything away, but actually hiring a company to do the next best thing, erasing their memory of their not-so-loved one.

In the center of it all, the reason for the main character Joel’s torment (Jim Carrey) stands Kate Winslet’s Clementine. She embodies a type of woman every man in the world knows at least one of. She is extremely impulsive, inconsistent, emotional, though also charming, attractive and a lot of fun. Joel, a guy whose life is going nowhere, is immediately swept away by her, in large part due to their extremely contrasting personalities. He sees in her another way of life, he wants her to save her. And that just makes it all the worse when he finds out that, not only is their relationship over, she’s made sure of it that there is no chance of reconciliation.

One thing I liked about this movie is that, while a lot of other movies have one main storyline and add a few others with the supporting cast to fill it up, the minor storylines in this film really fit the theme. Similar to the main storyline, they’re also about denying and resisting the reality that love brings. Every character cheats in his own way, trying to avoid a love situation that basically is already part of reality. And every time it comes back to them and forces them in the acceptance phase after all. You can see this as a debate. The film first, by its title and by Kirsten Dunst’s character, repeatedly brings forward a proposition, which basically says: Ignorance is bliss. At the end of the movie, all the characters find out the hard way that it isn’t, or at least that it’s a state that’s bound to collapse. The sunshine really isn’t eternal, and the spotless mind will inevitably be corrupted.

A movie I think was influenced a lot by this one is Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer, where there’s also a male lead unable to handle a breakup with an very charismatic girl. Both also have a very unconventional timeline. ‘Eternal Sunshine’ however doesn’t ever feel forced, or save perhaps for the baby scenes, probably due to their highly comedic nature.

The movie didn’t fare too well at the Academy Awards. Though it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Winslet was nominated for her leading role, the recognition was somewhat disappointing. I think Focus Features, which produced the movie, saw it coming, due to the date the film was released. The American film year is basically built around two high profile periods, one is the blockbuster summer, the other is Oscar season, which begins mid-October and ends on New Year’s Eve due to the Oscar eligibility rules. You may notice that every other American film on this list was released in one of those periods, the ones that made the most money, in the former, all the others, in the latter. Something to note is that Oscar season, naturally, does not exist in Europe, leading to the Oscar-bait there often being dumped in the middle of nowhere. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had its American wide release in March, which is basically a period where movies go to die. So it seems the studio didn’t have too much hope for it from the beginning, financially or critically.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Original title: Das Leben der Anderen

This movie about an extremely unlikely hero is one of the few redemption stories that, I find, actually work. Taking place somewhere before the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany, the whole movie is bathed in paranoia. And one man actually thrives in it, secret service agent Wiesler. When his character is introduced, you hate him. Passionately. He is unbelievably calculated and systematic and zealously believes without a doubt that what he does is right. Doubt, however, is instilled by a couple of intellectuals, artists, that he is tasked to monitor. As it turns out, Wiesler is not insensitive to literature or classical music. It’s a part of him he didn’t know and actor Ulrich Mühe, who unfortunately passed away a year after the film’s release, plays him, without losing the character’s restrain, very curious, but also very afraid of his own experiences. The contrast between the disciplined Stasi workers and the passionate artist couple is striking, of course in part due to the couple’s frequent romantic interactions. And it’s especially the woman that turns Wiesler to self-doubt.

Apart from the redemption story, the romance story and the resistance story, this film also functions as a spy thriller. Wiesler demonstrates on both sides tremendous cunning and discipline and shows us the inner workings of the Stasi in detail, from interrogation techniques to monitoring to blackmail, an aspect I found particularly fascinating.

WALL-E (2008)

This is a film very dear to me. Because I saw the movie weeks after its release, by which time hype had built up to such proportions space really seemed the final frontier, I was very skeptical. I knew Pixar had eye for detail and were all for good storytelling  accessible for everyone, as they had demonstrated with Finding Nemo, also written and directed by Andrew Stanton. I knew they  could take a somewhat tired concept like the comic book hero and hold it in a new light, as in The Incredibles. I was aware that they could reduce their competitive counterpart to a mere imitator or slapstick parody and that they had an arguably flawless track record, winning three of the seven Oscars for Best Animated Feature in the process. What I did not know, however, is that they could do this.

The movie brings the oldest film genre, the silent film, and the newest, the CGI animated feature, together, while pausing at a few of the genres in between, like the musical and of course, the science fiction film. Unheard of in the family film genre,  which usually caters to children with an attention span far from enough to read through even a single entry of this list, the movie starts with 45-minutes without barely any dialogue with an interesting and surprisingly accurate interpretation and portrayal of loneliness. Haunting shots of a desolate earth, bleak in its use of colors, set up a clear distinct tone, unseen in any other Disney production.

I can’t emphasize enough what an achievement it is, in this day and age, to bring a large section of a movie to a mainstream audience, characterize the main characters, and establish a touching romance almost without dialogue, with characters that can be counted on one hand. A lot of credit goes to Thomas Newman’s score, which, like in the old silent movies, tells the story through its evocative nature. After I saw this movie I found myself being agitated far more often by badly written dialogue in films, thinking it should’ve been cut instead. A lot of blockbusters don’t know the philosophy of “Show, don’t tell” anymore. Where they reveal important plot points like twists through dialogue and the dialogue itself feels like a mission briefing, the one thing they do show is action. But unfortunately, because explosions can now be measured like a heart rate, a certain number per minute, the cutting always gets quicker through the years and the volume of both the score and abovementioned explosions keeps rising, nothing of importance can ever happen in action scenes, or otherwise the audience would simply miss it.

I wonder how Pixar greenlit the project, taking a huge needless risk. That risk is, however, highly reduced by the second half. The farther the protagonist travels from Earth, the safer territories the movie seeks out. The second half brings out the kinetic action traditionally present in family movies, which stands highly in contrast with the meticulously paced beginning. Ironically, although this part is much more commercially safe, it’s also the most controversial, feeding the movie’s detractors when debating whether or not this truly is a masterpiece.

One thing is inarguable however, this postapocalyptic science fiction animated  romantic comedy family film broke genre conventions noone even dared to touch, let alone someone inside the studio system. Nearly every one of those genres that make up this mix, however, is highly Academy-unfriendly. Though the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, it failed to make the top category. I believe this movie, paired with The Dark Knight, both of which were great financial and critical successes, led to the Academy’s decision to expand the Best Picture race to ten slots to avoid similar snubs. Unfortunately it was too late, and the year in which this was decided was quite weak. Two genres, however, rose up that year. Which? …You guessed it: animation (which led to a five slot animation Oscar race) and science fiction (District 9 and Star Trek).

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

In the extraordinary year 2007 that saw about half a dozen films better than any film in a lot of other years, it was clear the five Best Picture slots were heavily contended. Among the high-profile movies that missed out were Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, David Fincher’s  Zodiac and this highly poetic modern western. Since the story was familiar for Americans, there was no need to emphasize the historic events that took place, hence the quite unsubtle title. This isn’t a movie about what happened, but  about how it happened. It’s a very atmospheric film, you could even say a leading role goes to the cinematographer, Roger Deakins. Impossibly gorgeous shots constantly fill the screen, even though the events often take place in quite barren environments. Deakins makes even something as simple as a train coming to a stop or the shadow of a chair jawdroppingly beautiful.

A lot of attention goes to the character Robert Ford, brilliantly portrayed by Casey Affleck. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, while everyone else around Jesse (Brad Pitt) reveres him and is completely intimidated and frightened by him, it’s the so called coward who is able to gather up his courage to stand up to him. It’s not only Affleck who deserves a place in the spotlight, the film displays a lot of talent in its supporting cast, hinting towards future success. While Affleck went on to lead Gone Baby Gone,  his colleagues, like Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) and Sam Rockwell (Moon), soon followed as leads in their own movie, being highly commended for it. We even get a glimpse of the sparkle that is Zooey Deschanel ((500) Days of Summer).

However, something can be said about the casting of Brad Pitt. Since he was also a producer on the picture, you can see that he very passionate about the project, but perhaps he could’ve cast someone else. Although it’s very much believable that the companions of Pitt’s Jesse James would idolize him, them being terrified to death of him is less of a sell. Unfortunately, the film was a financial flop and, while both Affleck and Deakins got nominations, this is one of the two films on this list that didn’t win at least one Oscar.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

In what is the greatest one-man-show and with it, the greatest performance of the decade, Daniel Day-Lewis blew away all the competition for the Best Actor Oscar to the point of George Clooney admitting, after himself being nominated: “He sort of irritates all of us because he’s so good. I’ll tell you right now. I don’t like him!”

His performance reminded me of other screen portraits of unsympathetic characters, like Robert De Niro in my all-time favorites Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and the, perhaps not entirely unsympathetic, but certainly alienating Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote a few years earlier than ‘Blood’. Perhaps the similarity to Raging Bull is the biggest one, since it’s also a story about a man whose steadily growing temper and mistrust gets the better of him and ends up ruining any form of human connection he has. Both are also success stories, men of power on the rise. Though where the two characters differ, is that Plainview is much, much tougher. La Motta can be seen as quite a petty character, simple in mind, who loses control of himself and his surroundings. Plainview however, is very much in control, preferably over everything and everyone. And it’s a bitter tale, because it’s clear Plainview really does care for his son, as is evident in the drilling accident scene and its aftermath, but due to his own demeanor and attitude in life the relationship seemed inevitably doomed.

Not enough can be said about Day-Lewis’s portrayal. He commands the screen to such an extent that at the end of the movie, the audience really is scared he’ll drink their milkshakes. I’d like to quote a friend of director Paul Thomas Anderson on this, screenwriter/director Quentin Tarantino:

There are facts: water is wet, the sun is hot and Daniel Day-Lewis in this film is great. [...] When Daniel Day-Lewis’s character breaks his leg in the mine and finds the gold, look at that surrounding. [...] It doesn’t show his journey back to town. [...] Literally, he’s got a broken leg, he would’ve had to actually, through those rocks, drag himself by his elbows miles and miles through the roughest terrain you can imagine, until he finally got to the town and sought medical care, while having to leave the gold that he found. That’s not a contrivance, that’s not a misstep. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance so embodies the character, that you can imagine he did just that.

The Departed (2006)

Though most of Martin Scorsese’s releases in the noughties, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, were well-written, well-acted, well-shot, well-everything, they lacked a certain charm to really stand out. The Departed however, has charm in abundance. With an all-star cast only a director of his caliber could attract, Scorsese launches the audience in this thrillride remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs. For me, this film encompasses the joy of going to the movies. I’ve seen this movie so many times I probably know most of the dialogue by heart. The flow is expertly paced and cut by Scorsese’s longtime friend Thelma Schoonmaker, who makes sure the movie has a constant forward drive. This is really a movie where you fasten your seatbelt and you hold on for the ride.

And yet with the quick pace and suspense, it doesn’t lose its sense of humanity. In huge part this is due to how William Monahan wrote Leonardo Dicaprio’s character, Billy Costigan, a young kid, heavily troubled and way in over his head in his assignment by the police. In this respect, the film boasts extremely well-written dialogue, especially in the shrink-scenes. But it’s of course Dicaprio himself who gets to put this gravitas to the screen. Due to his boyish looks, you can imagine what a hard time he would have in a criminal environment where he doesn’t really seem to fit in. And a hard time it is. Patronizingly crazy and unpredictable, Jack Nicholson doesn’t break a sweat to get the viewer’s attention. On the other end, the highly intelligent and cunning rat Colin Sullivan, played as a golden boy by Matt Damon, steadily shows more and more cracks in his calculated self. I have to mention Alec Baldwin, who as Colin’s boss really got me smiling, especially by the way he says “Go fuck yourself”, perhaps only outdone by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s outburst in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Scorsese is known for having hands-on experience with criminal organizations. It’s undoubtedly that experience that brought him, in for example Goodfellas and Mean Streets, to focus on the more lowly ranked thug, the foot soldier, as opposed to the crime lords that was the standard, especially since The Godfather. Also in this film we get a feel of the life of the small criminal on the street: the drug deals, the extortion for protection, and especially the machismo present in the interactions between them.

And then there’s the violence. Scorsese always tries to depict violence as honestly as possible. No bullets flying around without the hero getting hit, no 20-minute fight or chase scenes, no wound without consequence. Violence in his films is gritty and often anticlimactic, and it really, really hurts. Yet there’s a lot of it, akin to how Scorsese once described his surroundings when he was young as being full of violence without reason whatsoever. This is probably more clear in Mean Streets’s bar fight scene. One other thing he avoids is clichés, I don’t think a lot of people saw the ending coming. As this a very Shakespearean crime drama – it even has several direct references in for example “Heavy lies the crown” and “The readiness is all” – it has a very Shakespearean ending.

Though previously mentioned Scorsese crime films were admittedly more daring, it’s here he focuses on giving the audience the greatest experience he can. He finally, after five nominations and after releasing much more Oscar-friendly movies that decade, won his first Best Director Oscar, cleaning that blemish off of the Academy’s record in the process. And to this film’s opposition: No, it wasn’t a pity Oscar or just a career Oscar, The Departed truly was the best directed film of that year.

Though the above movies are unranked, the following three movies are so good, I had to distinguish them from any other. So without further ado, I honor the absolute best of ten years of filmmaking.

3. Spirited Away (2001)

Original title: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi

Hayao Miyazaki is a genius.

So now that that’s settled, let’s talk about the movie. I remember this movie playing at a local entertainment store on the largest flatscreens they had. I hadn’t seen the movie back then, so I had no idea what it was about. For some reason, the store owners failed to enable the subtitles, and since the store was very busy that time of day, I couldn’t hear much of the Japanese dialogue either. I only saw a couple of scenes of it, but I can tell you, it severely weirded me out. Of course after seeing the movie I can only affirm what a monumental, original expression piece of imagination this is. It’s full of memorable, unique setpieces: the emergence of the spirits, the machine room, the slimy spirit bath scene, that really, really creepy all-eating blob… The strangest creatures all pass through the movie. One of Miyazaki’s earlier works, Princess Mononoke, also introduced a range of magical spirit critters, but with this movie, he really pushes the envelope. I have to admit I still wonder how Miyazaki pulled it off, what elements he introduced, to make all those scenes work. It doesn’t lack humor either, one of my favorite scenes is the very funny wordless elevator scene.

Keeping the movie accessible is the adorable and relatable girl Chihiro. A theme I find interesting in movies is the resilience of children, the use of children as more than victims that need protecting or reassuring. Chihiro sure is resilient and fierce, going through a lot of disturbing situations without the movie resorting to cheesy moments or trying to make the audience pity her, which makes a lot of other films really cheap. Because honestly, anyone can make an audience feel pity on a pre-teen child who experiences traumatic events. It’s one of the many similarities to the also very fine, though far less imaginative, animated feature Coraline, released a couple of years later.

You might have noticed this is the second of only two films on this list not in the English language. I’m entirely to blame for this, it has nothing to do with the quality of foreign films in this period. It’s just that most films that are available to me are in English. Though I have seen a lot of the talked-about foreign features, I still have a lot of catching up to do, namely the Golden Palm winners.

2. Mulholland Dr. (2001)

If you compare the state of filmmaking of that decade to other modern artforms, one thing you can conclude is that postmodernism hasn’t really arrived yet on screen. While paintings have evolved from depicting historic events to abstract compositions seemingly without meaning, lyrics in music very often don’t make any sense at all and sculptures don’t need to strive for realism anymore either, the narrative in films is still considered very important. Films can’t afford to be about nothing, while the merit of other artforms often are pure aesthetics. One film that introduced a mild form of postmodernism to the mainstream is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Though Tarantino’s work has often been accused of being only style and no substance, the previously explained view on the art classifies this accusation to being completely besides the point.

A more recent postmodernist film is this David Lynch masterpiece. Don’t let anyone fool you, nobody in the world really knows how the plot works, Lynch himself might not know. This is however completely irrelevant. With Naomi Watts’s breakthrough performance as Betty and still her best to date, the film is able to draw the viewer in this surreal world without the viewer comprehending anything that happens. With completely unexplained phenomena (the box!) and actors switching parts it would drive a viewer too focused on the plot mad. Though it still is more than able to evoke emotional response and has the audience really caring for innocent and good-natured Betty. Only a director who absolutely knows what he’s doing could deliver a film like this, bringing all the elements of  a engaging film without relying on the safety of standards that exist as long as film itself. The film also constantly lingers in a state of suspense and mystique. I felt a bit like when I watched Psycho, the story starts out with a suspenseful premise, it seems completely laid out in high detail, and then, suddenly, the film completely changes. It feels like one large dream sequence. And what a dream it is.

As was expected, this film really didn’t receive too much attention by the Academy. As the Academy’s taste is situated in the middle ground between populist and elitist, this extremely unconventional film only got a Best Director nod for Lynch.

1. No Country for Old Men (2007)

Although, as previously mentioned, the year 2007 had many great films, everybody knew the Best Picture race that year was between two top contenders. In one corner of the ring, you had There Will Be Blood, in the other, this Coen brothers thriller, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel by the same name. While a lot of black humor is present in the movie – the Coen brothers never fail to bring their sense of comedy in any movie – some of the jokes are actually played on the audience. As the title clearly indicates, the movie is about an old sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, living in a 1980s Texas highly unfriendly to people weakened by old age, in one part due to its heavily violent nature. The crime case he gets completely overwhelmed by functions as an illustration of this world.

As the director duo clearly knows how to build a suspenseful thriller, the viewer really gets on the edge of his seat. Modern audiences are so trained to think in clichés by your run-of-the-mill thriller, that the directors know exactly what their expectations are. The directors hold the viewer in his place for a while, after which they abruptly pull him back to where it really matters, not with the youngsters. This is a movie that revolves around the old men and women scattered throughout the movie, all who have no idea how to handle the new generation, in often very funny interactions. It really is no country for old men. The protagonist gets to accept that it’s not necessarily the youngsters who have gotten more ruthless and violent than in his prime, but it’s him who has lost his edge. Before giving a vulnerable final monologue, he retires.

Although the cat and mouse crime story has a high symbolic value, like a parable, it’s pulled off in style. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh really sends the viewer shivers down his spine. Chigurh, as a symbol for the old men’s view of modern crime, is absolute and without origin, background or nationality. His accent is untraceable, as is his haircut. A special mention goes to the gas station scene. Honestly, that must be one of the best scenes ever written. Josh Brolin’s opportunistic Llewelyn is the one we get to root for. A thing I love about this movie is how we get to see Llewelyn’s preparations and the measures he takes to avoid getting killed. A role I especially liked was that of his wife, played by Kelly Macdonald. She really plays it naive and somewhat stupid amidst all those tough males, without it becoming a laughable comedic role and keeping a certain earnest gravitas.

Putting it all on film is, yet again, Roger Deakins, who in that year was a double Oscar nominee. Especially the action scenes are impeccably shot, hence that they took the shot of Llewelyn running from the car of Mexicans as the poster. All in all, this is a near perfect film and in my humble opinion… no, not really, it simply is the best film of the decade.

Johan Honggokoesoemo 14/12/2009